The Kingston Media Reader 3.0 has a compact design and a robust construction making it great as a desktop companion or an all-in-one reader for your computer bag. This media reader is capable of reading most common flash memory cards including CF type l and ll, microSD, standard SD (SD, HC, XC), and Memory Stick and can all be done with the speed of USB 3.0 (if you hadn't guessed already). Featuring a brushed aluminum look and a neat Kingston logo that glows when a flash card is inserted, this Media Reader is easy on the eyes as it plows through all of your precious bits and bytes.

If you are looking for a compact, super-fast USB 3.0 card reader that you can easily take with you on the go, then this may just be the perfect reader for you. The Kingston MobileLite G3 card reader is small, is USB 3.0 (also backwards-compatible with USB 2.0) and can handle SD/SDHC/SDXC, Micro SD/SDHC/SDXC and Memory Stick Pro Duo memory cards. Kingston has been making the MobileLite card readers for years and the MobileLite G3 is the third in the series. Retractable covers protect your drive and SD cards from the perils of day-to-day wear and tear and is a non-intrusive add-on to your digital payload.

OCZ Techonology's acquisition of Indilinx has paid off for them with the stellar performance of the Vertex 4 SSD, and taking it a step further, their new Vector series SSDs. Having the ability to design the drive's controller has allowed OCZ the nimbleness and flexibility to tune their drives to be faster and have more balanced performance than their primary competitors. In addition to leading the speeds in almost every test, the balanced performance is huge in differentiating it from its similarly-priced sibling, the Vertex 4.

Power users have long known HyperX as the innovative brand from Kingston Technology and the new DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 Flash drive continues this tradition by featuring the fastest speeds and largest capacity Kingston offers for portable storage. With three different capacities available and USB 3.0 capabilities this is a blazing fast USB drive with enough capacity to give it some serious utility. Featuring a high-speed 8-channel architecture that provides USB 3.0 data transfer speeds with capacities up to 256GB, DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 is the perfect solution for expanding a notebook’s storage and for quickly storing, transferring and backing up any digital lifestyle. Users will save time associated with opening and transferring large files and applications between devices.

The budget SSD market segment has grown with great celerity during the year of 2012, with multiple drives breaching the $1/GB threshold. The V series is Kingston's approach to capture the dollar-stretching consumer. Taking a quick peek at the V200 you will not see a SandForce, Marvell, or even an Indilinx flash controller. What you will discover is a Toshiba branded JMicron. The choice of manufacturer's to branch out and use more than the venerable SandForce controllers creates for an exciting environment. Now let us take the plunge and see how Kingston's V200 fares against the competition.

The Vertex 4 is the first SSD from OCZ to ship without the popular SandForce 2281 controller, opting instead for a fresh set of silicon from recently-acquired Indilinx. Despite some issues with write amplification, OCZ's original implementation of the Everest controller in their Octane SSD proved to be quite formidable. The Everest 2-equipped Vertex 4 delivers on the amazing sequential and random write performance promised by Everest 2, with none of the write amplification drawbacks of the previous controller.

Kingston released the HyperX 240GB SSD just under a year ago, which was very well received as a high quality, high performance SSD. It also came with a price tag of $499.99 for the 240GB model (today that price has dropped to $399.99), which puts it out of the picture for more budget-minded builders. This year Kingston released the HyperX 3K model with essentially the same parts except: the endurance of the NAND memory units. The original model uses Intel 25nm Compute-Quality MLC NAND with 5,000 p/e (program/erase) cycles, while the newer 3K operates MLC NAND with only 3,000 p/e cycles (hence the 3K in the name). This allows for the market price of the 3K to be significantly less at $224.99; over 50% off the original MSRP! When SSDs first hit the market, there was considerable worry that these NAND memory chips would not last very long and data would start to degrade over time. New technologies arose, such as TRIM, and allowed for the lifecycle of a NAND chip to be maximized. This is the exact difference between these two Kingston SSDs: how many times can the drive be written over before it becomes a brick. 3,000 p/e cycles means you can write 240GB to the drive 3,000 times, which turns out to be 720TB; more than enough for many years of use (by which time you will probably have upgraded it).

Patriot Memory introduced their first "aggressively-priced" SSD earlier last year, the original Pyro SSD. The original Pyro was one which pushed the price point of SSDs and offered the venerable Sandforce SF-2200 controller, and the Pyro SE is not much different. The primary difference here is that the Pyro SE uses synchronous NAND, whereas the original Pyro used asynchronous NAND. The result is a faster MLC NAND, and drastic improvements when incompressible file transfers are called to and from the Pyro SE.